If you fear eternity in heaven, then you should probably read this
Hi guys. I was the guy who made a post on this subreddit about going insane like 2 weeks ago about eternity in heaven. I had an irrational fear of eternity, eternal life, heaven etc. It was bad because I am a Christian and I believe in afterlife. It was so bad that I hoped my belief was wrong because I didn't want there to be an afterlife despite my understanding pointing towards Christianity being true. Because of this fear I was depressed and unable to focus on my daily life. I looked up this fear and I found out it was called Apeirophobia. I found out that many people also have this phobia including Christians like myself. I managed to overcome this fear and I am going to explain how I did it. If you have this fear, it's very important to overcome it because you're going to die one day and there are 2 things that could happen after death: 1) eternal oblivion 2) afterlife You have to accept both of those possibilities to live a life without worry and existential dread. The thing about 2nd option is that there are many kinds of afterlives, so for an example if you believe in reincarnation, you won't have to worry about eternity, because you won't be able to feel it since you lose all memories of your past lives and start fresh in another life.I would like it if there was reincarnation, but I don't think that's the case. I'm not going to talk about how to accept eternal oblivion, there are many videos and articles about that topic. I'm going to talk about the fear of eternity, since it is a really obscure fear and not a lot of people talk about it. The afterlife I'll be talking about in this post is afterlife in heaven, which is the one that I used to be scared of. Enough rumbling, let's start:
- What is Apeirophobia and why did it scare me ?
Apeirophobia is a fear of eternal life. There are many things that scare people about eternal life in heaven. This are the things that worried me:
1) Eternity is a long time. It's literally the longest possible time. Will I get bored at one point ? Will I go insane ? Will I run out of things to do ?
2) Everything has an end. We see things around us ending all the time. It's easy to imagine an end to our life. But imagining life without end scared me. I couldn't grasp this concept and I was scared a lot.
3) If there is an eternal life in heaven what's the point of anything in this life. Life lasts around 70-something years. What is 70 years to eternity. Does this make my earthly life irrelevant. Does this make this moment right now irrelevant.
- Understanding my fear better
One of the best ways to overcome a fear is to understand it better, so I did my research on Apeirophobia. I couldn't find much about it. A lot of people were finding it impossible to beat and that got me even more scared. I was scared that I will never overcome this fear and that I'll live with it forever. But then I looked into it a bit deeper and found a perfect definition of Apeirophobia. It isn't a phobia, it is a concept awareness issue. It is when person discovers his about his soul's eternal nature. The problem is that our soul is stuck in an imperfect body that isn't capable of understanding eternity. That is why I struggled with it. Because I couldn't grasp the concept of eternity since I'm not an eternal being yet. That helped me a bit, but still didn't completely get rid of this "fear".
- Overcoming my "fear"
So I thought about it for some time until I finally got it. To not fear eternity I had to get rid of worries about the things that scared me about eternity.
1)"Eternity is a long time. It's literally the longest possible time. Will I get bored at one point ? Will I go insane ? Will I run out of things to do ?"
What made me feel better:
"Will I get bored at one point?"
In Heaven, we will be "fixed". We will be unable to get bored and we'll be able to infinitely enjoy things we like, which means we will never get bored. We will also love God and everyone and God and everyone will love us. Love can't get boring. You see couples arguing and breaking up. That's because they didn't truly love each other. People who truly love each other don't care about physical appearances or money. The only thing they care about is love they have for each other. You can see that the old couples are the happiest. Both of them are old and not so pretty like they used to be. But they are still happy and are only getting happier. Love doesn't get boring, it only grows more and more.
"Will I go insane?"
No. As I said we're getting fixed in heaven which means we will be cleaned from our fears and our mental illnesses and we'll become immune to them. Some people think that we'll lose free will and that we'll be unable to sin but that just isn't true. Think about Satan. How could he betray God if there was no free will or sin in heaven. In heaven we'll learn how disgusting and wrong sin actually is and we will lose the will to sin. We might sin sometimes, but we'll feel regret and God will forgive us.
"Will I run out of things to do?"
Heaven is infinite and there are infinitely many things to do and we'll never be able to run out of things to do. Maybe God might even create another reality and have us live another life there again (just like we did on Earth). Maybe we'll explore this infinite universe. We'll meet infinite number of people. There are infinite possibilities and it's impossible to run out of things to do.
2)"Everything has an end. We see things around us ending all the time. It's easy to imagine an end to our life. But imagining life without end scared me. I couldn't grasp this concept and I was scared a lot."
What made me feel better:
As I said it before we will be "fixed" when we go to heaven and we will be able to understand eternity and not fear it. That's the thing. I am not going to have any worries about eternity in heaven, because I'll be able to understand it. I can't understand it now. So why worry about it. The solution is: don't think about it. You can't understand it now. If you can't understand it now, then there's no point in trying to understand it. What I always say to myself when I think about this is: "There's nothing to worry about when it comes to heaven. I will not suffer there, so I should not worry about that. I can't understand eternity now, so I won't think about it now."
3)"If there is an eternal life in heaven what's the point of anything in this life. Life lasts around 70-something years. What is 70 years to eternity. Does this make my earthly life irrelevant. Does this make this moment right now irrelevant.
What made me feel better:
One of the problems of this phobia is feeling lack of purpose. I'm not worried about my purpose in heaven, because I don't understand heaven yet, but I'm worried about purpose of this life. The thing that helps me is that we are not certain that there is heaven. There is a possibility that there is no such thing as heaven. That's why you should value your earthly life more and live it like there's nothing beyond it. I believe there is, but I try to live it to the fullest l, I try accomplish all my goals and I try to enjoy it as much as I can. I try to give my life another purpose next to the Christian purpose. But if there is afterlife that doesn't make this life irrelevant. In this life we don't have the presence of God and we have to learn to enjoy life without Him so we could enjoy life with Him even more. We also learn about love, we learn about God and we face our fears. We learn about sin and how we should live. This life is important because it shapes our personality. This life is what decides if we go to Heaven. Heaven is a reward for living our life full of love for God and our loved ones.
The message: If you think about death, don't think of it as an end, but don't try think about things that come after death because you can't understand it yet. If you think like that you might lose the fear of both death and eternity. It worked for me, hopefully it will for you too